Why is Colorado a competitive state?

Colorado, a state with a long history of supporting Republican presidential candidates, twice voted for Dwight Eisenhower with over 60 percent support. (Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post)

Perhaps the best thing about covering an election season is having regular access to the brains of political scientists, who — through their distinctly politics-tinted lenses — are really looking at the big-picture changes in our world.

Take, for instance, this seemingly simple question: Why does Colorado matter in this election?

Understanding why Colorado is even competitive requires a wider look. And the results of a new University of Denver poll of likely Colorado voters provide just such a glimpse: It’s not so much that the politics have changed — as many have suggested — as it is that Colorado has changed.

For most of the 33 presidential elections in which Colorado has been involved, the state has been solidly Republican. We’ve voted GOP 22 times. We chose Nixon over Kennedy. We voted against FDR twice. We never once went for Grover Cleveland, despite three chances to do so.

Buttons for the 1908 campaign of William Jennings Bryan, the only Democrat Colorado has ever supported for president who lost the national election. (Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post)

For six straight presidential elections, between 1968 and 1988, we voted GOP. Seven times, we’ve stuck with the Republican even while the nation went for the Democrat; there’s been only one Democrat — William Jennings Bryan, our state’s first liberal love — who we voted for even when he lost. And, more recently, while Bill Clinton breezed to a 9-percentage-point re-election win in 1996, we picked Bob Dole, by nearly 2 percentage points.

Through wars, peacetime, droughts, bounties, depressions, booms and busts, Colorado has largely been a stable Republican vote in the presidential race. So what happened?

In a blog post, DU political science professor Peter Hanson uses the new poll to examine how migration to the state has impacted the politics here. What he finds is eye-opening.

Colorado natives, it turns out, are still reliably Republican — this year going for Romney over Obama 48 percent to 43. But Colorado natives made up only 29 percent of those polled. The majority of the people in the poll — like the majority of people in Colorado, according to the U.S. Census — moved here from somewhere else. And those migrants swing for Obama in DU’s poll, 48-42.

“This is good evidence,” Hanson said in an interview on Sunday, “that the people who are moving to the state are bringing with them a new kind of politics.”

Hanson’s findings also further confirm what the writer Bill Bishop and the sociologist Robert Cushing suggested in their book “The Big Sort”: Colorado is importing Democrats. In their research, the pair chopped the state’s counties up into three groups based the amount of population inflow. The group with the highest amount of newly arrived residents — which included the Denver suburbs whose shift toward Democrats is seen as key to the state’s swinginess — was also the most Democratic in the 2004 election. The group with the least amount of inflow was the most Republican.

Of course, there are other reasons for political change. The state’s rising (and, in many cases, homegrown) Hispanic population is one. A greater concentration of population in urban areas, compared to rural areas, may be another.

Dwight Eisenhower relaxes on a fishing trip to Fraser during his first presidential campaign. (Denver Post file photo)

But, if migration is as big of a factor as Hanson’s findings suggest it is, then the state that twice voted for Dwight Eisenhower with 60 percent support won’t ever be the same again.

“What it suggests,” University of Colorado political science professor Kenneth Bickers told The Denver Post in 2008 for a story about politics and demographic change, “is that the Obama victory isn’t just because of increased turnout.”

The way that Romney is starting to sound, there will be two Obamas running. It’s doubtful that the hard right will be too accepting of the “new” Romney positions. Who is this chameleon? Mr. Etch-a-Sketch is confusing everybody.

Boulder Independent

A long article is not required to state the obvious: the voters in this State are split relatively equally among Democrats, Republican and Independents. No candidate can win a straight party-line vote.

As for the comment that “the newcomers are bringing a new kind of politics with them…” I don’t have an issue with their politics as long as they do not bring the tax and spend and pension policies of the states they departed (see CA, IL, NY,). This state runs very efficiently under a balanced budget and fiscal conservatism demanded by TABOR. As soon as the “newcomers” start demanding more government services and publicly funded “rights” (read, entitlements), then they will compromise the exact reasons they came here.

I should hope that if the voters in Denver want to provide additional services to their residents, then they should vote to tax themselves–not impose their desires on those in the remainder of the state, and the rural counties in particular, to fund services that are not needed or they are not willing to pay for.

Ray

I am an Ivy League-educated corporate attorney who moved here six months ago from San Francisco. Every other transplant from a coast that I’ve met in Colorado has either been an attorney, a physician, or a tech engineer. All of us make six figure salaries. If there is somehow the impression that we are “demanding more government services and publicly funded rights” then you should disabuse yourself of that notion, and quickly. We pay a LOT in taxes and help support all the government services for the Colorado “natives”. We are contributing to the vibrant economy here, enriching the culture, and moving the state towards the high-tech service economy that is the future of Colorado. Yes we tend to be liberal, but in general a lot of professionals with graduate degrees from top schools tend to be liberal. Just look at Silicon Valley. If this is not the Colorado that you want, then I’m sorry. But I suspect that the Colorado you will see in 5 or 10 years will look a lot more like California — economically, demographically, culturally — than Nebraska. That’s the reality.

http://www.lovemypetsupply.com/ Halloween dog costumes

that twice voted for Dwight Eisenhower with 60 percent support won’t ever be the same again.

http://www.drmg.ca/get-quote digital marketing

Carver
Media Group is well aware of this fact and thus, provides the best Website
Development services.

Lynn Bartels thinks politics is like sports but without the big salaries and protective cups. The Washington Post's "The Fix" blog has named her one of Colorado's best political reporters and tweeters.

Joey Bunch has been a reporter for 28 years, including the last 12 at The Denver Post. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry.